Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.

I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.

Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.

That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.

I’m not fawning over it but it’s

- usually better than Google

- has actually useful features (smush BS listicle articles together, weight/block sites)

- if you don’t use any searches that month, they’ll just straight up refund the month subscription automatically

- doesn’t annoy me constantly